Juvenile Delinquency/Truancy

Abstract

Juvenile delinquency, in the context of education, refers to the broad topic of juvenile lawlessness, which encompasses everything from drug and alcohol abuse to school violence. Truancy can be seen as a specific type of juvenile delinquency that, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the US Department of Justice, refers to a student's unexcused absences from school. Beyond its connection to poor academic performance, many researchers have concluded that truancy is an important predictor of juvenile delinquency. In recent decades, as the US public education system has developed a reputation for underperforming students, politicians, law enforcement officials, teachers, parents, and school administrators have made renewed efforts to curb truancy in the belief that regular school attendance is vital to improving student achievement in an increasingly global economy.

School Safety > Juvenile Delinquency/Truancy

Overview

Truancy is defined as an unexcused absence from school. This is not necessarily the same as excessive absence, which, historically, has been caused by a variety of factors, the most predominant being severe illness (Jennings, 1927; Brazelton, 1939). This factor has been reduced through widespread vaccination programs and modern medical care. Truancy may be mild—"ditching" school on a Friday in the spring— but it can also turn into the habit of avoiding school whenever possible. The problem of truancy in the United States has existed since the passage of compulsory education laws in the nineteenth century, which required public school students to attend classes for a given number of hours each week, for a number of days each year, and until a certain age (typically sixteen or eighteen). Legally, truancy is what is termed a status offense, meaning that it only applies to children below a state-mandated age.

Compulsory Education Laws

In 1867, two years after the Civil War, the US Congress created a special department of education to oversee the reform of public education in the US. The South, which had Union troops on its soil until 1878, was required by the federal government to create public school systems to help educate freed slaves as well as the many poor White children who had no formal education (Schlesinger, 1933, p. 160). In rural areas where children worked in the family fields, the school year was considerably shorter than that of students pouring into America's growing big cities.

Beginning in the 1870s, both Northern and Southern states began to pass compulsory school attendance laws, though states with large numbers of new immigrants, partially dependent on the wages from their children's labor, moved more cautiously in that direction:

"During the nineteenth century, in particular, a large percentage of Americans were ambivalent about compulsory schooling laws. Some parents openly resisted enforcement of them, saying that it was no business of the state to meddle in family decisions. . . . Many citizens regarded footloose truants as harmless Huck Finns. When attendance offers enforced child labor laws, parents often resented the loss of their children's income, employers lost cheap labor, and many of the children themselves had no desire to return to school. One factory inspector in Chicago found that 412 of the 500 children she interviewed would rather have worked in the factory than gone to school" (Tyack & Berkowitz, 1977, pp. 32–33).

In 1918, Mississippi was the last of the forty-eight states to pass a compulsory education law. In the twenty-first century, all fifty states have such laws on the books.

The laws had a positive educational effect—from 1878 to 1898, the number of children attending public schools rose from nine million to fifteen million. Meanwhile, during this same twenty-year period, to accommodate the influx of new pupils, the number of kindergartens rose from less than two hundred to more than three thousand, and the number of high schools grew from less than 800 to 5,500 (Schlesinger, 1933, p. 162). In the twenty-first century, compulsory education laws remained in effect in all US states, and though each state's laws may differ slightly, the basic principles remain. All states have an age at which a child must be enrolled in school, an age which allows a student to choose to no longer attend school, and an age at which government funded education is no longer available to an individual. Failing to enroll a child and ensure they attend school regularly until the minimum age can result in penalties for the parents, depending on the state ("What you need," n.d.).

The Truant Officer

In many locales, police officers known as a truant officers were charged with enforcing education laws. While many truant officers upheld the highest ethical standards, scholars have shown that, in some cases, they were abusing their mandate. For instance, after Michigan passed a compulsory education law in 1883, 37 percent of anti-truancy arrests in the 1890s were made "between 8:00 PM and 2:00 AM, well outside of school hours" (Wolcott, 2001, p. 356). It also seems to have been the practice of the police to use the court system to prosecute only habitual truants. Others were sent home to their disapproving parents or enrolled in "truant schools" to instill some discipline in wayward youth (Wolcott, 2001, p. 356).

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, truancy has been addressed with a combination of methods depending on the nature and frequency of the offense. Many public school districts offer counseling services to attempt to get to the root causes of a student's truancy, social workers assist with family therapy sessions or parent training as needed, and the juvenile justice system provides a last resort of court-ordered drug and alcohol treatment programs or even imprisonment in a juvenile facility for truants who commit crimes ("What you need," n.d.).

Truancy by the Numbers

Given what is at stake in truant behavior, the data concerning truancy in the US in the twenty-first century have been maddeningly imprecise. As one scholar notes,

"While anecdotal evidence suggests that truancy has reached epidemic proportions, we do not have accurate estimates of the prevalence of truancy in the United States due to inconsistent tracking and reporting practices of schools. As a result, our best current estimates of the national state of truancy are from self-reported data" (Henry, 2007). Similarly, Weathers and Loeb reported that 80 percent of states had laws concerning truancy, but less than half of these states reported the data (2022).

Even so, the available information is sufficient to paint a very different picture of the truant student than that of the "harmless Huck Finn" or enterprising street urchin envisioned by many Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. There is evidence from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and other metropolitan schools of thousands of instances of truancy each day. In Minneapolis, researchers noted that only 47 percent of students were in school at least 95 percent of the time during the 1999–2000 school year, though the number rose to nearly 57 percent in 2001–2002 (Hinx, Kapp & Snapp, 2003, p. 149). Among a random sampling of students who participated in the national Monitoring the Future survey in 2003, 10.5 percent of eighth graders reported that they had skipped school at least once in the previous four weeks, while 16.4 percent of tenth-grade students said they had done the same (Henry, 2007). In a 2010 report by Puzzanchera, et al. for the National Center for Juvenile Justice, truancy cases presented to juvenile courts increased 67 percent from 1995 to 2007. The Center for American Progress reported that approximately 7.5 million American students were chronically absent from school in 2012 (Ahmad & Miller, 2015).

Local work has been done by three different grand juries in Miami-Dade County in Florida, which found that 75 to 85 percent of its serious criminal offenders in the early 1990s had a history of being truant or absent from school for long stretches of time beginning in the third grade (cited in NCSE, n.d.). It is also the case that truant students account for a large percentage of juvenile crime—in San Diego alone, 37 percent of juvenile crime in 2001 occurred between 8:30 AM and 1:29 PM (cited by San Diego Public Safety & Neighborhood Services Committee, 2002, p. 8). Finally, and perhaps contrary to some assumptions, only 54 percent of truancy cases that went to court involved boys (cited in NCSE, n.d.).

In the 2020s, school attendance became even more complicated in the US as schools closed their doors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many schools reopened several times before remaining open in the 2021 school year, but illnesses amongst students and teachers made attendance and keeping up with coursework a difficult task. In 2019, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that at least 10 percent of stunts in kindergarten and first grade missed a month or more of school, while 19 percent of older children missed this amount. However, COVID-19 was estimated to more than double this rate ("School attendance," 2022). In April 2023, Jones II reported that students were chronically absent across the country (Jones II, 2023).

The picture of truancy facing school officials, civic leaders, and parents is much more complicated and challenging than it has been in the past. It is incumbent upon state and federal governments to develop a common methodology for assessing truancy in America so that researchers can develop a more precise understanding of truancy and how it can be prevented—something that will be a benefit both to students and to society as a whole.

Further Insights

State Compulsory Attendance Laws

Each state has a law on the books that stipulates the age at which a student must begin attending school and the age until which he or she must remain in school (the "legal dropout age"). Every state requires that students remain in school until at least age sixteen, while a number require students to remain in school until age eighteen. For more detailed and up-to-date information on specific state requirements, see "Compulsory Attendance Laws Listed by State," a publication of the National Center for School Engagement.

What Makes a Student Become Truant?

While there are many theories regarding the causes of truancy, Henry (2007) points out that one thing is consistent: there is very little information on the subject.

"In addition to a paucity of research pertaining to the prevalence of truancy in the United States, we also know surprisingly little about the correlates of truancy. That is, while several studies have assessed the consequences of truancy, no studies that could be identified have assessed the predictors, causes, or correlates of truancy using a nationally representative sample of youth. It is surprising to note that very little research has been conducted to understand truant behavior" (Henry, 2007, p. 30).

However, it is possible to draw some preliminary conclusions based on self-reported data, localized case studies, and the like. According to the Center for American Progress, "Truancy is a multifaceted problem with push-and-pull factors from a variety of sources, including student-specific variables, family- and community-specific characteristics, school-specific factors, and influences such as poor academic performance, lack of self-esteem or ambition, unaddressed mental health needs, alcohol and drug use, and poor student health" (Ahmad & Miller, 2015). Given the complexity of the context in which truancy takes place, establishing causality (e.g., establishing that truancy leads to drug use) may prove to be more difficult.

More than a half-century ago, Formwalt (1947) made an astute observation: "Truancy may be 'absence without leave' but seldom is it 'absence without reason'" (p. 89). According to the US Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, there are three factors that tend to make students truant:

* A negative school environment

* Problems within their families or communities

* Psychological factors within students themselves (OJJDP, n.d.).

A Negative School Environment

Some schools have poorly developed attendance policies and students do not fully understand the school's attendance expectations. Other schools, due to a lack of organization, fail to inform parents of their child's truancy, thus preventing parents from addressing the problem. In terms of the school culture, some schools fail to prevent violence within schools, such as bullying, and marginalized students use truancy as a safety option. Finally, some schools do not provide an adequate level of service to special education students, thus allowing them to become frustrated and eventually disillusioned with school altogether. It was also estimated that around 5 percent of children have anxiety related to school attendance, and though they struggle to verbalize why they refuse to attend or do not want to attend school, they are compelled to avoid it ("School attendance," 2022).

Problems within Their Families or Communities

To combat truancy in the twenty-first century, Jones notes that community support and family involvement are critical (Jones II, 2023). Students in high-crime, high-poverty areas are often faced with many negative role models, including other truants, drug dealers, and gang members, and some choose the path of least resistance. Some students are required to look after their younger siblings while parents work or seek adequate childcare. Other students are victims of abuse and neglect, and their parents do not stress the importance of education or make the effort to see them off to school. Older students, particularly teenage mothers, might be truant because they are caring for their own children.

Psychological Factors within Students Themselves

Some students, for a variety of reasons, do not value education, and thus they do not see the harm in skipping school on a regular basis. In some cases, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy by skipping a few days of school, suffering the academic consequences, getting discouraged, and then skipping more and more frequently. Other students suffer from low self-esteem or from an undiagnosed psychological disorder or learning disabilities that hinders their academic achievement. Students with ADHD, Autism, or developmental delays were more than twice as likely to have excessive absences as their peers ("School attendance," 2022). Finally, some students are habitually truant because of drug or alcohol abuse.

How Does Truancy Impact the Individual and Society as a Whole?

Researchers have been able to trace the impact of habitual truancy on the subsequent lives of those students. While there is no one-to-one or strict cause-and-effect relationship between truancy and any particular result, research collected by the US Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention does show that students who are habitually truant display these tendencies:

* Do poorly in school

* More isolated from the wider society

* Display low self-esteem

* At greater risk for abusing drugs and alcohol

* At greater risk for teen pregnancy

* Have poor employment records and/or job prospects

* More prone to violence and incarceration

Habitual truancy does not simply affect the individual in question. For the wider society, according to the National Center for School Engagement (2006), there are four main costs of truancy:

* The immediate costs to solve the problem, including social services, court costs, counseling, etc.

* The well-established relationship between habitual truancy and dropping out of high school; high school dropouts earn considerably less in a lifetime and are much more likely to be dependent on state or federal social welfare programs.

* Habitual truants tend to become involved in juvenile crime, and combating such crime involves law enforcement resources.

* Habitual truants who are juvenile offenders are much more likely to commit crime as adults, committing more serious types of crimes; this puts added stress on the criminal justice system.

School Attendance as a Predictor of Graduation

Increased school attendance is directly correlated with higher achievement on standardized tests. In Minneapolis, for example, attendance rates have been an important predictor of achievement on eighth-grade standardized reading and math exams:

A 2007 study released by the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago found that race and socioeconomic level were not as important in predicting whether an incoming high school student would graduate than freshman grades, which are dependent upon attendance rate (Allensworth & Easton, 2007). "On average, a Chicago public school freshman misses 20 school days a year—enough to give just a 50–50 chance of graduating, regardless of test scores in eighth grade, according to the study" (Demirjian, 2007, para. 7). Healthy Children echoed this finding in 2022, noting that students who are consistently absent are more likely to drop out of school, get suspended, use substances, and have poor health as adults ("School attendance," 2022).

Parental Involvement in Truancy

School principals have long been concerned that lack of adequate parental involvement in the education of their children has made life for teachers and school administrators more difficult than need be. A 1937 survey of public school principals revealed that the top four "problems they would like to lay before parents" were:

* Time spent on homework/amount of homework

* Amount of time and the type of "entertainments"

* Lack of cooperation between parents and their child's teachers

* Their children's "excused and unexcused absences"

(Shannon, Fridiana, Gabrielis, & Leonardilla, 1937, p. 366).

Most educators continue to be concerned at the lack of parental involvement in the lives of their children, including the lack of consequences for repeated truancy. Educators understand that their policies are often effective only when they benefit from strong parental support.

Thanks to a growing number of state laws that allow courts to hold parents responsible for their habitually truant children, some states and local areas have taken a get-tough approach. In a suburb of Denver, the parents of a girl who missed forty-three days of school were held in contempt of court and sentenced to ten-day and thirty-day jail terms, respectively ("Daughter's Truancy," 1987). In St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2003, one parent received 179 days in jail, and school officials noted that whenever they prosecuted such careless parents, truancy rates would drop by more than half (Johnson, 2003). Because truant children are minors under the law, many argue that parents remain ethically and morally responsible—if not legally responsible—for their behavior.

In the 2020s, parental punishments for student truancy remained a state issue, but one that proved itself to be difficult to navigate. In 2011, the truancy program, backed by Kamala Harris, passed in California state legislature, allowing district attorneys to prosecute parents of students who missed more than 10 percent of the school year. This plan was well intended, but the reality of the new rule complicated truancy issues for low-income and chronically ill parents (Demby, 2020).

Community-Based Approaches to Reducing Truancy

In addition to holding parents accountable for their children's attendance, more and more cities have been taking a proactive approach. In Philadelphia, where 9.5 percent of students were truant on any given school day prior to 2007, the School District of Philadelphia created the Parent Truancy Officer Program. The program has been staffed by five hundred parent truant officers who fan out over Philadelphia's neighborhoods to ensure that students find their way to school ("Mayor John Street," 2007). Clearly, in the opinion of the mayor and other community leaders, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure:

"Truancy and curfew violations are among the strongest indicators for identifying children at risk for delinquency or violence," Mayor Street said. "Parent truant officers are an important component of our increased efforts to ensure our children have a successful life. Parents and guardians are the first line of defense and the home is where the important message of attending school must originate, but everyone in the community must play a role in ensuring children are in school. These additional parent truant officers will make a difference" ("Mayor John Street," 2007, para. 8).

Philadelphia also allows students to expunge their prior truancy records by signing a pledge to remain in school and upholding their end of the bargain. If they do not, their parents face fines or even imprisonment.

The US Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention provides a helpful Model Program Guide that presents information on successful, cost-effective truancy reduction, prevention, and rehabilitation programs. The programs address the entire truancy continuum, from prevention to sanctions (family therapy, case management, etc.) to residential programs to reentry into adult society. The department uses robust scientific methodology for scoring each program.

For those interested in developing truancy prevention programs, or simply seeking to understand how they work (or do not work), the National Criminal Justice Reference Service offers a Tool Kit for Creating Your Own Truancy Reduction Program. And though dated, the Manual to Combat Truancy (1996) from the US Department of Education, in cooperation with the US Department of Justice, remains a useful resource for establishing best practices in combating habitual truancy. The Center for American Progress recommended a number of solutions to reduce truancy, including improving data collection for early warning systems; developing a national definition of truancy, chronic truancy, and chronic absenteeism; increasing wrap-around services, such as after-school or early learning programs, health agencies, social services organizations to meet students' needs; reducing punitive policies for truancy; and increasing parental involvement.

Viewpoints: Is Compulsory Education Outmoded?

While compulsory education enjoys widespread public, political, and teacher support, there are critics—many sympathetic with the homeschooling movement—who believe that requiring students to attend classes at and for a certain period of time is an unjust limitation of their civil liberties, not to mention expensive and sometimes futile.

John Taylor Gatto, a former New York State teacher of the year, left the public school system and became a harsh critic of it. In his seminal history of American education, The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling, Gatto argues against John Dewey and others, that public schools are enemies of individualism that stifle exceptionalism and creativity (Gatto, 2001).

Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today and author of The Case against Adolescence, has argued that one-size-fits-all education prolongs adolescence and gives young people excuses not to grow up. In a blog message about his thesis, he states, "I say that we need to give young people incentives and opportunities to join the adult world. For many, this will mean quickly testing out of high school and pursuing work interests. High school is a waste of time for many or most young people, which is one reason the dropout rate is so high" (Epstein, 2007).

Terms and Concepts

Compulsory Attendance: The idea, enshrined in the laws of every state, that children should remain in school until a specified age and should be in class during the school year unless they have a legitimate excuse.

Dropout Age: The state-approved age, typically 16 or 18, at which students can withdraw from school.

Juvenile Delinquency: A term used to describe illegal behavior by those under 18.

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention: An office of the US Department of Justice that is a clearinghouse for information on juvenile delinquency and truancy.

Public Education: A system of free K-12 education designed for all American children.

Public School: A local school that typically is either an elementary school (K-6), middle school, or high school.

School Violence: Any aggressive behavior that takes place on school grounds before, during, or after school.

Truancy: A term used to describe students who are absent from school without a valid excuse. It can exist in mild or extreme forms.

Unexcused Absence: A term used to explain that a student who should be in school is away without a valid excuse.

Bibliography

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Allensworth, E. & Easton, J.Q. (2007). What matters for staying on-track and graduating in Chicago public schools. Consortium on Chicago School Research, University of Chicago (July 2007). Retrieved August 25, 2007, from the Consortium on Chicago School Research http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/content/publications.php?pub%5Fid=116

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Demby, G. (2020, Oct. 17). The story behind Kamala Harris' truancy program. NPR. Retrieved June 25, 2023, from https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/10/17/924766186/the-story-behind-kamala-harriss-truancy-program

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Jennings, J. (1927). A study of absences from school in two counties of Tennessee. Peabody Journal of Education, 4, 276-293.

Johnson, C. (2003, February 24). Kids' truancy gets parents jailed. St. Petersburg Times. Retrieved August 25, 2007, from http://www.sptimes.com/2003/02/24/Citrus/Kids%5F%5Ftruancy%5Fgets%5Fpa.shtml

Jones II, A. (2023, April 18). Students are chronically absent across the country. COVID seems to have made it worse. ABC News. Retrieved June 25, 2023, from https://abcnews.go.com/US/students-chronically-absent-country-covid-made-worse/story?id=95936160

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School attendance, truancy & chronic absenteeism: What parents need to know. Healthy Children. Retrieved June 25, 2023, from https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/gradeschool/school/Pages/School-Attendance-Truancy-Chronic-Absenteeism.aspx

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Shannon, J. R., Fridiana, M., Gabrielis, M. & Leonardilla, M. Problems that principals would like to lay before parents. The School Review, 45, 364-367.

Tyack, D. & Berkowitz, M. (1977). The man nobody liked: Toward a social history of the truant officer, 1840-1940. American Quarterly, 29, 31-54. DOI:10.2307/2712260

Weathers, E. & Loeb, D. (2022). The avaliability of truency data across states. Urban. Retrieved June 25, 2023, from https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/The%20Availability%20of%20Truancy%20Data%20across%20States.pdf

Welch-Brewer, C., Stoddard-Dare, P., & Mallett, C. (2011). Race, substance abuse, and mental health disorders as predictors of juvenile court outcomes: Do they vary by gender? Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal, 28, 229-241. Retrieved December 13, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=60411621&site=ehost-live

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Wolcott, D. (2001). "The cop will get you": The police and discretionary juvenile justice, 1890-1940. Journal of Social History, 35, 349-371.

Suggested Reading

Archambault, L., Kennedy, K., & Bender, S. (2013). Cybertruancy: Addressing issues of attendance in the digital age. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 46, 1-28. Retrieved December 13, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=90419556&site=ehost-live

Carlen, P. (1992). Pindown, truancy, and the interrogation of discipline: A paper about theory, policy, social worker bashing and hypocrisy. Journal of Law and Society, 19(2), 251-270. https://doi.org/10.2307/1410223

DeSocio, J., VanCura, M., Nelson, L., Hewitt, G., Kitzman, H., & Cole, R. (2007). Engaging truant adolescents: Results from a multifaceted intervention pilot. Preventing School Failure 51(3), 3-9 https://doi.org/9.10.3200/PSFL.51.3.3-11

Herrera, S. (2006). Working with highly mobile, immigrant students in Houston, TX. National Center for School Engagement. Retrieved August 25, 2007, from National Center for School Engagement http://www.schoolengagement.org/TruancypreventionRegistry/Admin/Resources/Resources/80.pdf

Lassonde, S. (1996). Learning and earning: Schooling, juvenile employment, and the early life course in late nineteenth-century New Haven. Journal of Social History, 29, 839-870. Retrieved September 19, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Complete. http:// search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9606200721&site=ehost-live

McCray, E. (2006). It's 10 a.m.: Do you know where your children are? Intervention in School & Clinic, 42(1), 30-33. https://doi.org/10.1177/105345120604200105

Mueller, D., Giacomazzi, A., & Stoddard, C. (2006). Dealing with chronic absenteeism and its related consequences: The process and short-term effects of a diversionary juvenile court intervention. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 11(2), 199–219. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327671espr1102‗5

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